tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28102666.post8622488865229903158..comments2015-08-01T20:00:30.377-05:00Comments on Boston 1775: That Wasn’t Hamilton’s “Hideous Monster”J. L. Bellnoreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28102666.post-10394286407692905172012-08-08T21:52:57.689-05:002012-08-08T21:52:57.689-05:00This comment is an example of how the political cu...This comment is an example of how the political cult of the Founders isn&#39;t really directed toward understanding the thinking, lives, or many disagreements of those men. As with the Supreme Court justices&#39; quotation of Hamilton out of context, it&#39;s all about seizing on words to justify modern political positions. <br /><br />Creating a straw-man argument in order to complain that Hamilton wouldn&#39;t have supported Medicare, Medicaid, or the individual mandate to buy health insurance enacted under Governor Romney and President Obama shows no interest in understanding the man as an individual of his time. It treats Hamilton merely as a flag to be captured and used to rally an attack on political ideas that the writer dislikes. <br /><br />Hamilton had no opinion on modern health care delivery, nor nuclear weapons, nor whether railroads required the institution of time zones. We don&#39;t know how he and his colleagues would feel about the size and cost of today&#39;s military, a big part of our &quot;big government&quot; today. We don&#39;t know what Hamilton would think if he were transported magically to our time or if he&#39;d been magically raised in our time. (The latter probably would depend greatly on his circumstances in life.)<br /><br />Some people today do indeed want to provide medical care in a &quot;just, equitable, civilized, and humane&quot; way. Others don&#39;t see that as a priority. But that&#39;s not what Hamilton was considering in <i>The Federalist Papers</i>. There are precedents in eighteenth-century America on public health, insurance, and even purchasing mandates. But it strikes me as foolish to make our modern medical policy depend on the thinking of a generation who hadn&#39;t yet learned to scrub their hands before surgery.J. L. Bellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15405157000473731801noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28102666.post-75339647013277123012012-07-28T14:22:13.444-05:002012-07-28T14:22:13.444-05:00This is indeed an out of context quote for Hamilto...This is indeed an out of context quote for Hamilton. However, it is equally incorrect to suggest that Hamilton&#39;s notion of a strong federal government is in any way congruent with the present scope and size of government, or that he would in any way support government mandated healthcare. Hamilton was certainly the &quot;big government&quot; guy of his day, but one has to consider what he was contrasting the proposed Constitution with - The Articles of Confederation. One also has to consider Hamilton&#39;s personal experience with mobs - even mobs which were on the same side. (Miles Cooper at Princeton.) He and other Federalists didn&#39;t like the anarchist/redistributionist tendencies of the mobs - like Shays&#39; Rebellion. <br /><br />So, to suggest that Hamilton would have been for the redistributionist-aimed ObamaCare is ludicrous. See Donald Berwyck&#39;s (Donald Berwick, President Obama&#39;s nominee to head the Centers for Medicare &amp; Medicaid Services) <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2Kevz_9lsw" rel="nofollow">comments</a> acknowledging this fact. &quot;...any healthcare plan that is just, equitable, civilized, and humane, MUST, MUST, redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent healthcare is by definition redistribution.&quot; It is hard to think of anything more at odds with Hamilton&#39;s principles.martinhttp://www.whatwouldthefoundersthink.com/noreply@blogger.com